


Mint

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Series: And They Fell Like Dominoes [1]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Drabble Collection, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 12:24:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4019626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of a filthy rich boy and a clever dick girl at one of the world's most prestigious universities; of cheap wine and red plush; of betrayal, and bad blood, and her reading glasses. This time, he takes her to bed (well, settee).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mint

**Author's Note:**

> Migrated from my Tumblr. Here be F words, and a lot of other words besides.

“See, this puts me in a really difficult position.”

Olivier d’Athos (not a man, though his previous girlfriends might have something to say about that, not a boy, though the two lecturers who’ve fallen foul of his tongue might have something to say about _that_ ) raises his gaze from contemplation of several coloured blocks that either will or won’t tessellate. There’s nothing he can do but rotate them, which he continues to do, swiping his thumb left and right even as he looks up, glancing at her for what has to be at least the fifth (but feels like the first) time. It’s gone eleven, but he doesn’t have anywhere better to be.

“Are you,” she wonders, swirling the piss-coloured wine in her plastic glass. “Standing in the corner looking like you couldn’t care less because you actually couldn’t care less, or because you’ve decided it’s far more legit to look like you couldn’t care less than to actually participate?”

“And are you asking because you think girls who say provocative things and wear push-up bras are a cut above those who just wear push-up bras?” But he ends the game of Tetris, because for some reason, this feels like the first time ever. “Annie.” Her name lacks a syllable to pop. His lips round uselessly. “Doesn’t do parties.”

“It’s nearly Christmas,” she explains, without explaining anything, really. “I like Christmas.”

And he couldn’t unpick what it was if someone asked, what can’t be explained away by the fact that the Inseparables have, as it happens, separated for the night. There’s a girl at the end of each story, _the_ girl, the unobtainable girl whose door is, for once, open, but whose heart (‘heart’ being the politest way of putting it) may still be closed. No, he couldn’t untangle the threads of what it is tonight, or what it is about Annie, Annie’s untucked blouse and Annie’s little skirt and Annie’s hair super-charged Catholic icon-ing around her head. It’s curly, and brown, and unexceptional.

But it  _is_ there, so when he reaches for the piss-poor wine, it passes from her hand to his hand without resistance. It _is_ there, a current running down the wire with no insulation, so when he puts the glass down on someone’s baccy-strewn, liquor-sticky coffee table, and takes her hand instead of what she has in it, it jumps in his like a live bird.

**.**

She’s surprisingly heavy when she climbs on top of him, on top of a plush red settee with half the plush missing. He likes how solid she is, though. He likes the press of her there, through the green blouse, above the short skirt, the hot, steady feeling of her, ticking between his thighs like a time bomb. Her lashes tickle his cheek, first one side and then the other; she scrapes bitten nails over his scalp, over the curve of his skull, and he cuts both wisdom teeth and wisdom on the synthetic lace of her bra (not a boy, then, or not as much of a boy as she expected him to be).

Whatever she is, he’s heavier, and weighs her down and shuts her down and makes her knees shake and her head snap back, smack back into the arm of the sofa more than once. There’s a trick with his foul tongue and a Polo mint, and he’s more than willing to share it.

They hum small, insistent noises at each other, still half-dressed, and then they clamber back into each other, topple over at forty-five degree angles which mean no one’s to blame for who does what when. It’s warm and close and dark, the womb of this sick little world of names at the top of essays ensuring approbation and acceptance. It’s comfort in the extreme, and friction, and the rush and gush of love which leaves them both high, staring out of one another’s insides. It’s the start of something, and it wasn’t supposed to be. She uses the hard parts of her palms to push the hair back off his temples, hair the same colour as hers.

It’s not just because it's nearly Christmas.

**.**

“Bastard. Wanker. Buy some hand lotion next time, you fucker. Leave me out of it, cum-guzzling shit stain.”

It’s a little bit funny (this feeling inside): the complete lack of expression on her face while she’s calling him a cum-guzzling shit stain, still cool (still cooler than him, anyway), while she’s slurping vodka through a straw to speed it to her stomach. He wonders, Ollie does, if that means he’s off the hook (but then she slaps him with the hard part of her right hand, and once more with her left). It leaves the good kind of sting, the kind worth mulling over and buying hand lotion for.

Annie’s lower lip quivers as the red stain spreads across his cheeks. “I liked that,” she says. She wasn’t supposed to.

“I promise you can do it again next time I’m a bastard wanker cum-guzzling shit stain.”

She plants her elbows on the bar. “You think you’re so sorted, don’t you? You’ve got your boys, you’ve got your books…” If in doubt, one can always find the future ruler of this particular empire in an alcove, window seat or convenient hole in the ground, devouring philosophy he often doesn’t entirely understand. It sounds good, though, when he repeats it, when he relates morality in that detached way he says everything. “But I’m here now, and if I went away now, and never came back, you’d miss me.” And she’d miss him too, miss the crosspatch-y sound of pleasure in her ear. “You’d miss me so much, it’d ruin your life. Admit it, Ollie. You’re fucked.”

“‘Admit it, Ollie, _we’re_ fucked.’”

“How am _I_ fucked?”

“Because I remember fucking you. Because you’re remembering it right now.”

Her lipstick is smudged, marred by somebody’s tongue. “You love me,” she insists.

“ _You_ love _me_ ,” he replies (and acknowledges it silently, under his breath – except love at first sight doesn’t exist, does it, so the dart in his heart has nothing to do with Annie, Annie who sits at the back).

“You love me.” She leans forward, Ave Maria-ing above and beyond the crown of her head, unexceptionally beautiful. “And you always will.”


End file.
